Fluorescent Adolescent
by nlizzette7
Summary: "They walk along train tracks and rob banks with toy guns." / Effy and Cook AU, post s7. / Rated T for language.


**Dedicated to my lovely friend Shel on a very special birthday.**

* * *

**Fluorescent Adolescent**

_(You used to get it in your fishnets –_

_Now you only get it in your nightdress.)_

The thing with Effy Stonem and James Cook is that they never _end up_.

They never end up clasping hands in front of a pastor, like she might have if Freddie were still alive and the sky lit a bit brighter in the mornings. They never end up in a small flat, somewhat engaged, having sex in the shower before a breakfast of cold pancakes and cocaine. (Those were his fantasies, sometimes.)

They never end up soul mates, but that's alright.

(There's still a tattoo on his back that says _ride or die_, scrawled under a pair of stone cold eyes.)

/

Effy sees him first. It's not surprising at all.

She's worn the same little black slip dress for three days, and her hair is damp against the back of her neck. Strobe lights color her skin, wrap her up in sleeves of neon. She catches sight of a boy with a bull's temper and the devil's smile, blood crusted on his knuckles. The laugh comes the same, but he leans over in the crowd like there are ghosts on his back.

His shirt is torn down the side, and he rakes one hand through his overgrown hair, parts his lips to say that he's _fucking _Cook before slugging some bloke who's been looking at him the wrong way.

A pale hand curls around his forearm, and even his opponent stands still in his spot. Because there she is, Medusa's daughter struck by Aphrodite's charm. Cook falters, drops his fist, and she stands there the way she first did, her smile all-knowing, her finger following a single line down his shoulder.

They duck into a corner when the bass drops, and like some jacked-up Casablanca, Cook says, "Well, Peachy, of all the places…"

He slings an arm around her shoulders, draws her in more affectionately than he means to be. They release a long, silent breath, and she's ever-silent, curling her bitten fingernails into his chest.

"I'm running," she finally says.

Cook twines his fingers into her hair and pulls, just slightly. "Yeah? Coincidence, that is."

She draws back to look at him. "Fucking criminals," Effy smiles.

Cook uncaps a bottle with his teeth and touches a cut on her collar with his thumb. _"Fucking _criminals."

/

There are things they don't say.

_Naomi's probably dead._

_Foster definitely is._

_There's blood on my hands._

_And in my dreams._

But they don't whisper a thing as they kick glass bottles in the empty parking lot around back. She wraps her arms around herself and imagines years and years before, a young girl who thought herself born backwards, stripper tights and pop-star hair on the long walk home.

She glances at Cook, the boy who made her scream inside.

The car's messier than the boy himself, and it's clear he's been living out of it. Cook walks slower now, cooler even, halts in his tracks when a girl with a mousy face and lighter hair passes him by.

"Cook," Effy says, one hand on the car's hood.

The smile falls back into place, and he throws his middle fingers up at the sky before opening up her door. "Your chariot awaits, Princess."

She smirks, feels like this is something better than wandering, feels the quake of empty adventures, the return of Bonnie and Clyde '09.

Effy presses her forehead against the glass, crosses her eyes and pinches the skin under her thigh. "Funny being back here."

Neither laughs.

"Deja…" Cook trails off, drives drunk down a highway to nowhere, looks at her the entire time.

(He never did learn the word.)

/

"What happens now?" Effy asks, though it's more a prompt than a curiosity.

They sit on top of glass, bleeding cuts and the smell of smoke crying out to younger years. She wears stockings under a baby blue dress, bruises blossom under his eyes.

Cook cracks his knuckles but doesn't call her princess, because with Effy, that's implied.

He shoots her the wide grin that haunts her dreams along with paper swans and abandoned bus stops.

"Wherever you burn," he says, pulls a dying joint from his lips, "I ought to burn too."

/

They walk along train tracks and rob banks with toy guns.

In the winter, she wears leather jackets and silk dresses, and all the boys stare when she sits atop Laundromat counters, watches Cook turn all their whites pink. Sneaking into concerts and stealing dollar bills becomes a full-time job, and both are becoming well-versed in having everything and losing it all. She whispers this to herself, thinks of stocks and hospital rooms as he breathes heavy into her ear, bites at the leg resting on his shoulder.

Sometimes Effy goes back to not talking, and they drive for hours until the sky breaks in half.

/

It's spring when they decidedly become delirious off of each other, and Cook wonders why people get off on searching when it feels so good to be lost.

They lie cold on a rooftop, and the night sky matches her exactly. She says, "You're a piece of work, Cook."

His lips curl. "Speak for yourself, Eff."

_I could get used to this, _she doesn't say.

_I already have, _he doesn't reply.

Hours later, they get drunk and walk ledges with their eyes closed –

Invincibility has always been the key to love.

/

There's a night when she won't stop screaming, and Cook shakes her, pins her wrists to the backseat, struggling against her struggle until there are bruises on them both. There are stories written on their skin that they haven't bothered telling – and dams have a habit of bursting with the bad.

"Alright, wake up, _fucking _wake up."

"Tosser."

"Crazy bitch."

She pries away, and they stare at each other for a long time, breathless and half-broken. It's a pity to realize that they aren't kids anymore, that they can dance to house music until they're dead, drink until they're swimming on pavement, but there are still lines by his eyes and a drag in her step.

He can see it when she walks away.

And after, Cook will find her with her high heels still on, her feet sunk into a motel's abandoned pool. He'll watch her for a moment, think that there was a time when he tried to fall for chicks with hair like Effy's, though he never could find the right set of eyes.

(They've always been sort of tragic that way.)

"Tell me," he'll say – because they can fuck in closets and in nurse's offices to their heart's content, but those years, those losses will have counted for nothing if he can't give her this. Suddenly, he's desperate to tell her stories of baseball bats, drug deals, how all of it bled into one last snow. _Tell me_, he says because he wants to tell her too.

And suddenly, there are two grown ups where there shouldn't be, a difference bold enough to claim victory.

They're Elizabeth and James.

Sometimes.

/

They live in a flat years later – he does tattoos in a shop above a Chinese joint, and she studies, learns and observes with those careful eyes, wanders in memoriam of the boy who never got to leave.

"I haven't got any drugs," he says one day, that brown hair spiked where he slept on it.

She smiles that Effy smile, stirs in one of his stained shirts, proffers a spliff from God knows where.

He smiles right back, and they detonate for the billionth time.

_Tick_ –

"You and me," he rasps against her throat.

_Tick – _

She whispers, "It's always going to be you and me."

_Boom._

fin.


End file.
